Is there a place in the mind where we are free to let our thoughts go, where normative judgments and assessments are out of place, and where praise and shame do not apply? Much recent work, including my own, has been concerned with widening the scope of agency beyond that which is under our direct voluntary control. Many states of mind, including beliefs, emotions, and desires, are appropriate targets of certain reactive attitudes, even if such states cannot be directly controlled.

The role of imagination in religious consciousness is a topic of interest in philosophy and psychology of religion, religious studies, and theology. Study of religious imagination often goes together with phenomenology of religious experience, with the study of religious art, and with theologies emphasizing hermeneutics, or model-theoretic tasks.[i] My studies of the literature of religious imagination lead me to think that attitudes among theologians towards imagination’s role in the formation of religious ideas are often captive to broader differences between liberal and conservative theologies.[ii] This is seen to some extent across the Abrahamic family of testimonial traditions.[iii]

Is there a role for aesthetic judgements in science? One aspect of scientific practice, the use of thought experiments (TEs), has a clear aesthetic dimension. TEs are creatively produced artefacts that are designed to engage the imagination and are used to motivate, undermine, explain or clarify theories. Comparisons have been made between scientific (and philosophical) TEs and other aesthetically appreciated objects, namely works of art. In particular, TEs are said to share qualities with literary fiction as they invite us to imagine a fictional scenario and often have a narrative form (Elgin 2014). It is therefore unsurprising that TEs should bear significant aesthetic features. But philosophical discussions of aesthetics in science have focused mainly on the epistemic role of beauty and elegance when it comes to theories and mathematical proofs and TEs have been widely overlooked.

The Predictive Processing framework (PP) has become increasingly influential in recent years, with some claiming that it provides a grand-unifying theory of mental function, explaining perception, action and all cognitive processes in between (Clark 2015; Hohwy 2013). Some proponents of PP have claimed that it is particularly well-placed to explain imagination (Clark 2015 ch. 3; Kirchhoff 2018). This optimism is partly based on the idea that imagination-like processes, where agents endogenously generate content, are somewhat ubiquitous, playing a role in our everyday interactions with the world through perception and action.

We interrupt our summer hiatus to bring you this piece, originally published on the Psychology Today blog, by Bence Nanay.

It is easy to make fun of the Aristotelian idea that humans are rational animals. In fact, a bit too easy. Just look at the politicians we elect. Not so rational. Or look at all the well-demonstrated biases of decision-making, from confirmation bias to availability bias. Thinking of humans as deeply irrational has an illustrious history, from Francis Bacon through Nietzsche to Oscar Wilde, who, as so often, came up with the bonmot that sums it all up: "Man is a rational animal who always loses his temper when he is called upon to act in accordance with the dictates of reason"

My aim is to argue that humans are, in fact, not more rational, but less rational than other animals. Aristotle talked about rationality as the distinguishing feature of humans compared to other animals. I think we can use irrationality as a distinguishing feature. It’s not just that humans are irrational animals; humans are more irrational than any other animals.

I’m walking to the office and decide to take a slightly different route from usual. Normally I take High Street up to Cornmarket Street and then go straight. It takes me around twenty-five minutes. This time I turn off High Street much earlier. I’m wondering if I will still reach the office in under thirty minutes.

I seem to have two different ways of reaching a verdict on the conditional

(1) If I take the new route, then I will reach the office in under thirty minutes.

The first way consists of a series of inferences. For example, I might believe that the distance travelled via the new route is roughly the same as the distance of the old route and that my old route only takes twenty-five minutes. I use these beliefs in an inference to (1). The inference I use is not deductive, but it is an inference all the same.

There is also a second way that uses the imagination. I imagine myself taking the new route and then consider by what time I would reach the office. I fill in various details of the hypothetical scenario. One of these details may be that the walk takes me no longer than usual. When I imagine the hypothetical scenario as one in which the walk takes less than thirty minutes, I come to believe (1).

We might ask under what circumstances beliefs like my belief in (1) constitute knowledge. The question I’ll explore in this post is whether I have just presented you with two fundamentally different methods for reaching knowledge or just one. I’ll suggest the answer is ‘two’.

Why is it that some things are easier to imagine than others? A substantial part of the answer can be formulated by looking at the cognitive architecture of the human mind (i.e. the structure of the mind), which is what I will to do in this post. Here, I will explore how the cognitive architecture of our affective system influences the ‘affective forecasting’ system - the capacity we use when we try to accurately imagine (or forecast) our future moods and emotions in order to make decisions. When we affectively forecast, we do something more than just trying to imagine the phenomenal character of a mood or emotion; we try to imagine the phenomenal character that we actually will experience in a future scenario. For example, to decide whether or not to move to a new city, you can use imagination to figure out how you are going to feel when you are there; or, as in L.A. Paul’s example, to decide whether or not you want a child, you can try to imagine what having a child will be like and how that will make you feel (Paul, 2004). We can also use it in more mundane cases, like imagining how you will feel if you do badly in an exam, or if you are rejected by a date (Wilson and Gilbert, 2000; Levine et al., 2012).

Paul, a method actor, has been playing the role of Romeo on stage for a long time. Each time he takes the stage in front of spectators he feels that he becomes Romeo and that Romeo’s thoughts, emotions, and behaviors seem to be his own.

This case shows that Paul enters Romeo’s experience and shares his thoughts, emotions, and beliefs. Two psychologists, Geoff Kaufman and Lisa Libby (2012), introduced the concept of experience-taking to describe this phenomenon. According to Kaufman and Libby, experience-taking is an “imaginative process of spontaneously assuming the identity of a character in a narrative and simulating that character’s thoughts, emotions, behaviors, goals, and traits as if they were one’s own” (Kaufman & Libby 2012, p. 1). Through this experience-taking, Paul assumes that he is identical to Romeo and adopts Romeo’s thoughts, emotions, and actions as if he were Romeo. Kaufman and Libby also found that the extent to which one’s self-concept is salient is a crucial determinant in the occurrence and degree of experience-taking (see pp. 4–8); being in a state of reduced self-concept accessibility promotes higher levels of experience-taking, while being in a state of heightened self-concept accessibility makes it more difficult to engage in experience-taking. Experience-taking means not only thinking and feeling how others are thinking and feeling but also entails a kind of self–other merging.

At the peak of the mountain the sky hurled a lightning bolt in my path. A rounded and gnarled knot of white light and white heat hung at the center of the bolt. The phenomenon connected me, the sky, and the ground. I tried to imagine myself projected into the light and walked forward into the space where the orb hovered. I found myself standing in awe in the empty place where the lightning had been.

How does imagining contribute to our ability to experience sounds as music? Most people, when they listen to music, imagine a variety of things: a singer, a rising line, a swirl of activity, an approaching disaster, and so on. Some of these imaginings seem more closely connected to the music than others, but how are we to understand the notion of ‘closeness’ and when, if ever, is such imagining necessary?

It is standardly thought that imaginative experiences are not only ontologically homogeneous, but also phenomenally so. When asked to imagine the Notre-Dame Cathedral, construct visually elaborate daydreams or picture the face of a loved one, we naturally assume that in such cases - episodes of sensory imagining - each of us undergos experiences of roughly the same sort: conscious experiences involving mental imagery. Recent empirical findings however, suggest that this ordinary assumption is mistaken. In a number of recent studies Adam Zeman and colleagues at the University of Exeter document the main neurobehavioural features of a new mental imagery generation disorder known as aphantasia - a condition characterised bythe total (or otherwise severely reduced) incapacity to produce visual forms of mental imagery. There are, it turns out, a small percentage of the population - current estimations fall around the 2% benchmark - who lack a mind’s eye.

What is the logic of imagination? Which, if any, inferences involving the concept of imagination are valid?[1] Answering this contributes to understanding how and what we can learn from imagination, and also how imagination is constrained. In what follows, imaginative agents of interest are subjects that can be reasonably described as being capable of performing at least one step deductive inferences like conjunction introduction/elimination, modus ponens, and disjunction introduction.[2]

What is the relationship between imagining some thing and being motivated to act by that thing? More precisely: what is the relationship between imagining that P and acting for the reason that P? In this exploratory post, we sketch out some of the terrain, eliciting some crucial questions that need to be settled in order to better understand the relationship between imagination and rational motivation. We make a tentative initial argument for the view that there are no imaginary motivating reasons.

How can a theory of imagination help us understand thought experiments (“TEs”, for short)? In particular, can it help us answer the question of where they belong and what is their wider genus? Where should we locate TEs on a wider map of related activities? What are their closest relatives? Finding an answer is an important task that has not been undertaken seriously until now (but see on the Junkyard the posts by Eric Peterson and Mike Stuart, and Maks Del Mar).

Our imagination is useful in a variety of ways - including ways which engage with our beliefs, desires and knowledge, and ways that the philosophical literature sometimes overlooks. Our focus has often been on how the imagination can aid modal reasoning and scientific discovery – both important, but limited to technical thinking and expertise rather than everyday knowledge. Here, I want to highlight some more familiar ways that imagining can impact our beliefs and knowledge. I'll start by telling a story of why our attention has often been elsewhere until now.

In this post I am going to discuss the procedural narratives of visual artists with aphantasia, ‘a condition of reduced or absent voluntary imagery’ (Zeman et al 2015, p1). With the aim of finding out how aphantasia informs the individual’s creative process, I will focus on a claim that appears several times in the narratives: that the pictures the artists make stand in for or somehow supplant the mental imagery they lack. I will explore what could be meant by this, suggest an answer, then conclude by looking at how the answer might square with aphantasia being specifically a deficit of voluntary imagery. The post is a sketch for a more comprehensive qualitative study - comments and suggestions are very welcome.

Today we celebrate The Junkyard’s second birthday. A year ago, I reported some stats on The Junkyard’s first year. At that time, there had been about 9K unique visitors to the blog. We’ve had similar traffic in year two. As of the writing of this post, there have been over 18K unique visitors to the blog. These visitors have come from over 50 different countries. Though the vast majority of our visitors have come from the United States and the UK, we also seem to receive a fair amount of traffic from (in order): Canada, Israel, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Italy.

Can you really imagine being someone else—mind you, not just suppose that you are someone else, but imagine being an altogether different person? In what sense and to what degree can we actually achieve this task? What are the theoretical consequences of episodes of imagining being someone else for the contemporary debate on personal identity?

We discuss a fundamental challenge for artificial intelligence (AI) enabled systems: can machines imagine? According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, “to imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are… to represent possibilities other than the actual, to represent times other than the present, and to represent perspectives other than one’s own.”[1] Art is perhaps the paradigmatic example of human imagination. Figure 1 shows an untitled painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat that sold at a recent auction in New York City for over $100 million.

The scope of imagination in human society goes far beyond art: numerous examples can be given to illustrate that human achievements in the sciences, technology, literature, sculpture, poetry, religion, and beyond, depend fundamentally on our ability to imagine. The importance of imagination to humans naturally raises the question of whether intelligent machines can be endowed with similar abilities.